Raleigh

All Things Open is an amazing conference in its fourth year running hosted in Raleigh North Carolina. It’s a conference that celebrates open source and the community behind it. Two days of pure learning, networking and fun times with fellow developers.

_Early-Registration. Over 2000+ Attendees for two days._

You Should Go

• Affordable: for $199 this was a very inexpensive conference. The conference hotel for one day cost more than two days of tickets including great after hours celebrations on three days.
• Celebrates Open Source: the breadth and diversity of open source contributors is amazing. Spending a few days getting to talk to open source contributors and companies let’s you know what everyones interested in and where the industry is going.
• Diversity of Topics: There were 8 different tracks you could mix or match. If you were interested in tech, there was something there for you.

My Itinerary

I ended up going with focus on data science and analysis. My background is mostly in full-stack web so this was a refreshing change of pace. I also got to talk a bunch of companies that are defining how you can create companies around open source projects and meet diverse

Sessions

Tuesday

_Happy hour with Capital One. Toddy Music_

Wednesday

Had a great diversity of talks below. For my ticket I decided to volunteer and supervise a room for 4 hours in exchange for my ticket. I helped monitor the Hardware Track Room 2. Besides some near scares and running around searching for adapters it was a pretty tame time and excellent value.

• Data Engineering with Apache Solr and Spark: Grant Ingersoll
• Culture Trumps Tools: Matt Micene
• IOT/Hardware Track Room 2
  • Continious Engineering for IoT: Jim Ruehlin
  • Open Source for IoT: Dave Hoover
  • IoT: Myth’s and Realities: Timm McShanne
• NC: RIOT Demo Night. Tech and maker products.

Thursday

Scott’s talk was great and had everyone laughing. The rest of the day I continued doing more talks about data and distributed systems. It was a packed house to listen to Mitchell Hashimoto talk, it was very insighful about the challneges of building and maintaining a secure system. I also enjoyed Alex Meadow’s down to earth talk about open source and business intelligence.

• Keynote: Scott Hanselman
• Life in the Trenches with Spark: Ian Pointer
• An End to Boring Data with Visualizations: Heather Shapiro
• Secrets, Certificates, and Identity with Vault: Mitchell Hashimoto
• Building Next Generate Data Warehouses: Alex Meadows
• OMGWTFAMQP: Mark Lavin

Conclusion

_Arcades and Brews hosted by PayPal. BoxCar Barcade_

The event went by very quickly and I had an amazing time. I would definitely go again. The organizing team did a wonderful job and went all out to build a great conference. Next It will be on a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday next year and will be on October 22-24, 2017.